Special Note
The weekend of February 8-10, our church will engage in a week of reflection and study called, “First Things.”  Dr. Jim Baucom, pastor of the Rivermont Avenue Baptist Church in Lynchburg, VA, will be our guest facilitator.  Rivermont is a church very similar to Cliff Temple.  For years it was a declining congregation in a transitional inner-city neighborhood.  Under Jim’s leadership, the church has reclaimed its identity and embraced a new dream for its future.

The purpose of “First Things” will be to create a process by which our church defines the non-negotiable core values upon which we can all agree as essential to our church’s life and out of which we will do our ministry.  These “values” will be intended to help us redefine our mission and give unified focus and purpose to all that we do.

This sermon is the first in a series intended to provide the necessary focus in preparation for February 8-10.  Much of what is said in these sermons will assume what is only being communicated orally in our worship services at Cliff Temple.  The purpose of this special note was to provide a better context for understanding the sermon.

Recently, I had one of those “sit down and listen” experiences when Nancy and I had dinner with three couples from Cliff Temple, all young adults with small children.  It was not intended to be what it became.  All we had intended to do was share some food and a few laughs and play one of my favorite dinner games called, “who gets the check?”  And, we did that.  But, toward the end of the evening, when we should have been having desert, we got lost in one of the most refreshingly open and honest conversations I’ve had in a long time.  All the way home I felt that surge of energy you feel only when you’ve made genuine connection with someone else.  It was just a meal.  But, it was so much more.  We sat there, forgetting the time, eight believers honestly sharing beliefs and hopes, doubts and fears.  It was something like, well, like communion. 

It was so encouraging listening to these people describe their perceptions of this church, their love for it, their hope for its future and its relationship to their lives.  We talked about Jesus and the Bible and how we want to raise our children in the faith we have embraced.  It was wonderful.  And, it made me anticipate the weekend of February 8-10.  This promises to be one of the most important and spiritually potent weekends in our church’s recent history.  We’re going to sit down and have one of those communion conversations.  This morning I’d like the start the conversation with the Ephesians text we have read.

The apostle Paul was something like a circuit-riding preacher.  He’d start a church, nurture it for a while and then move on; he never stayed long in one place.  But, he always stayed in touch.  Since there was no such thing as email (you know, the good old days), letters were handwritten and sent by messenger from one place to another.  Copies were often made and sent to multiple churches.  The Holy Spirit has preserved one of those letters for us, Paul’s letter to the church at Ephesus.  It is not for certain that Paul actually started this church in Ephesus.  But, he was so connected to it that he once spent two years there, a very long stint by his standards.  And, he never stopped encouraging them.  This church was not a building with a street address.  It was a group of believers who regularly got together, over a very special meal, and shared their hopes and dreams, doubts and fears.   

This morning, to start our communion conversation, I’ll use three specific things Paul said to encourage the folks at Ephesus, make them my own and then give them to you.  Paul wrote lengthy letters; he had a hard time saying things succinctly.  Often, the last word of one sentence brought up another thought and he’d chase that for a while before he got back to what he what he had intended to say all along.  We’d be here all week trying to trace out all that he said in these few verses.  So, I will limit my conversation with you to three specific words of encouragement Paul used, pastor to people, to encourage their faith and encourage the life of the church.  I will also use these three thoughts as the framework of everything I say between now and February from this pulpit.  Please remember, I’m just starting a conversation I’ll ask you to sit down and have it with me, when it’s your time talk, mine to listen.  First,

May We Never Forget Our New Identity In Christ.  
Griffin lost his I.D. card one day and it caused quite a panic.  I never did walk five miles to school barefooted through the snow.  But, I never had to have more I.D. than the face I wore.  These days, you have to have an I.D. card with your picture on it before you enter many schools.  You can’t go anywhere without it.  Forget your books on the way to school if you will, just don’t forget your I.D.  Your I.D. verifies to everyone else who you really are.

The text we’ve read this morning starts with a reminder of our unique identity.  “For this reason,” Paul says, reminding us that he’d been chasing another thought to which he now intended to return.  A thought he started earlier when he said, “You were dead through trespasses and sins, you were strangers and aliens (Ephesians 2:1, 12, 19).”  That’s what we once were, before Christ did his work in us, dead.  Spiritually lifeless and without hope.  That’s bleak.  But, for our discussion of what we are in Christ to have any meaning, we must discuss what we were before the grace of God changed us.  It is impossible to talk about grace apart from sin.  Our sin is the black canvass against which God has painted his portrait of light and hope.  That’s one reason I am so open about my failures in life.  If I don’t talk about my sin, I can’t tell you what grace has meant to me.  There are plenty of pulpits where sin and grace are both discussed by the preacher at a safe, third-person distance.  From this preacher you will always hear about sin in the form of first-person confession so that you can also hear about grace as my personal experience, too.

The black canvass of hopelessness, “You were dead.”  The portrait of grace, “So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone.  In him the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord; in whom you also are built together spiritually into a dwelling place for God (Ephesians 2:19-22).” 

Our past and our sin is our old identity.  Our new identity is what Christ has done for us on the cross and is doing in our hearts.  He is not only making us new individually, he is making us, together, into his church.  In Ephesus, Jews and Greeks, despite their incredibly diverse heritage, were coming together as a family of faith in which they were not defined by their race or religious past but by their common bond, the grace of God in Christ.  The church is not meant to be the place where we are identified by what we have been but by what, in Christ, we are becoming.

I worked for an estate planning company before coming to Cliff Temple.  Believe me, it makes for interesting conversations when people ask me what I did before I came here.  Anyway, I discovered that it was impossible to talk to people about their financial plans for the future without discovering what they really valued most.  Sometimes, that got really interesting.  I remember one couple in particular.  Late sixties, early seventies, as I recall.  When I started asking them about their future plans, things got bogged down in a hurry.  For some two hours I sat at their kitchen table and listened as they emotionally and verbally filleted each other.  Not one kind word between them.  He was particularly brutal.  He rehearsed a whole litany of ways in which she had been a miserable failure of a wife.  He wouldn’t have anything to do with planning for her future financial security.  He honestly didn’t care.  Whatever future that couple faces, it will be one for which they are tragically ill-prepared because they could not release the past.  If they ever had been, they weren’t a family.  They were just two people cohabitating in a house with the thermostat set high on hate.

Our new identity is as the people of God, transformed by grace, no longer defined by what we have been but by what we are becoming in Christ.  May we never forget our new identity in Christ.  A family where the thermostat is set high on grace and in which we are more concerned about where we are going than where we have been.  May we never forget!  Second,

May We Have Moral Courage
Being a Christian in first century Ephesus was tough.  To be genuinely Christian was to be in the social, religious and economic minority.  Paul wrote to them, “I pray that, (Christ) may grant that you may be strengthened in your inner being with power through his Spirit . . ..”  It took moral courage to let your faith shape your life in ways that were counter-cultural in first century Ephesus.  It still does in twenty-first century Dallas.

One of my favorite Cliff Temple stories is one that Buddy Griffeth shared with me just before he died three years ago.  The Cotton Bowl was built in the late 30’s, about the time this sanctuary was built.  Buddy and his good friend Ken Mansfield wanted to go to the very first football played there but they didn’t have any money.  So, they just kept walking around the outside until they found a place where they could climb the fence.  Ken went first and then Buddy.  Just as Buddy dropped to the ground inside the fence he found himself standing face-to-face with a security guard who asked him what in the world he thought he was doing.  Buddy told the guard their story.  They just wanted to watch the game but didn’t have money for a ticket.  The security guard then said, “Son, this game’s free today.  You didn’t have to sneak in.  You could have just come in the front gate.”  It takes a lot of courage to scale a fence and risk arrest. 

It takes even more courage to think about the fences we have put up that may keep people out.  Religious people have this love affair with fences.  They look like essential structure to us.  They give definition to who we are as compared to others.  Baptist, not Methodist.  Conservative, not liberal.  The problem is that structures we use to give ourselves a sense of security are also fences others find too tall to climb even though we claim that what we have to offer on the inside is free for the taking.

I joined Baylor’s Landry Fitness Center this week.  From the moment I entered the building, someone took me by the hand and walked me through.  They not only demonstrated how what they have to offer is what I need, they did it in language I could understand.  Within thirty minutes, I had been oriented to my new hope for physical resurrection and invited to join, which I did.  I couldn’t help but wonder as I drove away.  When people come to this church looking for new hope for their spiritual resurrection, are we as accommodating?  How easy is it to get into this building, much less this family?  Once in, how easy is it to find your way around?  Do we use a language no one understands outside this family or building?  Are there fences here to which we are blind, or, worse yet, addicted because they give us a sense of security?  Will we have the moral courage to even ask?  I pray that we will.  “May (we) be strengthened in (our) inner being with power through his Spirit,” to face the truth about some of the fences we’ve inadvertently put up that keep people out.  Whatever moral courage it takes to face a world that may be hostile to our gospel, it takes even more to face the truth about ourselves.  Third,

May We Have Blank Check Imaginations
Someone wrote our church a blank check the other day.  Isn’t that wonderful?  The only place on the check filled out was the signature line.  The payee and line amounts were totally blank.  Of course, the check was returned.  And, since I have chosen not to know who gives what to this church financially, I don’t even know who it was who signed the blank check.  But, it got me to thinking.  What if, in preparation for February 8-10, even today for that matter, what if we all did that?  What if we gave God a blank check written on the accounts of our faith and hope and imaginations and let him fill in the amount?  The promise of scripture is that we won’t be disappointed.  “Now to him who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever.”  When we’ve come to the end of our imaginations, we’ve only reached the place where God is just getting started.  He wants to bless us beyond our wildest imaginations.  (1 Corinthians 2:9)

The other night at dinner, as I said, we played, “who gets the check.”  You’ve played that game, haven’t you?  The waiter puts the check on the table and everyone all of a sudden suffers from peripheral blindness, acting as if they don’t see it so someone else will pick it up.  It’s really a game of chicken.  Who’ll blink first?  Well, the other night, the bill was too big.  I’m trying to remember that, if you can’t even pronounce the name of the restaurant, you can’t afford to eat there.  As it was, the ability or willingness of any one person to pay the bill was limited.  So, we split it four ways.

We’ve been made a promise.  We can never write a blank check on faith or imagination that outstrips God’s ability or willingness to underwrite out of his own resources.  To give us a new identity.  To give us courage.  To give us a new dream.  What if we wrote that blank check?